Take a look at your customers and ask yourself: What are they thinking? What do they want? What do they like, and why do they like it? What do they dislike, and why do they dislike it?

If the answers to these questions were easy to figure out, every business would be successful; the entire concept of marketing wouldn’t even need to exist. But, that’s not the world we live in. The reality is our customers, and your customers, are complex, nuanced people who have a wide variety of likes, dislikes and reasons for those preferences. More than that, many of these customers don’t immediately know what they want or why they want it. It’s up to you to figure out what they need and how to nudge them along to that end goal.

Traditionally, this has required heavy investments into market research, focus groups and intense advertising campaigns to parse out what makes your customers tick. Today, data, behavioral targeting and predictive analytics have streamlined the game to an enormous degree, allowing for more precise, targeted messaging that yields greater ROI.

Personalizing Communications with Data

Analytics allow you to paint a portrait of your customer based on their past behavior. What they’ve purchased before, when they’ve purchased it, what actions they took to drive them to that purchase and any communications they had with you along the way all help you to put together an accurate profile of both your current customers and potential prospects. Once you’ve defined your customers in this way, you can anticipate what to do next before they even ask for it.

That’s what behavioral targeting is all about: Looking at the data you’ve drawn from your customers, and deciding what the best next action to take is. This is a significant departure from earlier means of providing customer offers, and is something made possible by digital transformation. Rather than blanket your customers with the same generic, one-size-fits-all printed leaflets, you can curate your digital offerings in real time to best fit who your customers are and what they want.

An example would be: Your wireless provider sends you an email offer about a new handset on sale. You click on the link and look through their website, but end up coming across a different handset you like better. You then pick up the phone to ask for more information. But, the call center rep’s immediate reaction is to tell you about the handset from the email, not the handset that you’re actually curious about.

That’s what happens without behavioral targeting. It’s all too easy for businesses to make incorrect assumptions about what a customer wants, and what to offer them (in this case, the additional details on the second handset you were more interested in), without the necessary data in hand to determine their best next action. Instead, as in this scenario, the customer relationship immediately gets off on the wrong foot because the provider didn’t accurately determine what you, the customer, actually wanted to talk about.

Pitney Bowes Best Next Action ensures that you’re coordinating digital and physical channels in tandem to determine what to offer your customer and when, at any step in the customer lifecycle. This ensures you’re not repeating irrelevant offers and only offering products, services or information that are relevant to their interests and past decisions.

Draw on sophisticated customer analytics for more proactive engagement with Pitney Bowes Digital Self Service Solutions. To learn more about how Pitney Bowes extrapolates insightful analytics from customer behavior in order to determine the best next action, check out our Customer Analytics Portfolio.

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Most likely, your business faces tough marketing questions: Where are my most profitable customers? What do they need? How do I reach more of them? Answers to these and many other questions lie in a richer view of customers and prospects.